ow to play, there are many who will never get beyond a rather
narrow limit, through lack of experience or of initiative.

It is quite safe to let experience take its chance through play, but
there are certain things that must be dealt with quite definitely, when
the teacher is not there as a playmate, but as something more in the
capacity of a mother. It is impossible to train all the habits necessary
at this time, through the spontaneous play, although incidentally many
will be greatly helped and made significant by it. If the children come
from poor homes where speech is imperfect, probably mere imitation of
the teacher, which is the chief factor in ordinary language training,
will be insufficient. It will be necessary to invent ways, chiefly
games, by which the vocal organs may be used; this may be considered
play, but it is more artificial and less spontaneous than the informal
activity already described. It is well to be clear as to the kind of
exercises best suited to make the vocal organs supple, and then to make
these the basis of a game: for example, little children constantly
imitate the cries of ordinary life; town children could dramatise a
railway station where the sounds produced by engines and by porters give
a valuable training; they could imitate street cries, the sound of the
wind, of motor hooters, sirens, or of church bells. Country children
could use the sounds of the farm-yard, the birds, or the wind. In the
recognition of sound, which is as necessary as its production, such a
guessing game could be taught as "I sent my son to be a grocer and the
first thing he sold began with _s_ and ended with _p_," using the
_sounds_, not names of the letters. For the acquisition of a vocabulary,
such a game as the Family Coach might be played and turned into many
other vehicles or objects about which many stories could be told. All
the time the game must be played with the same fidelity to the spirit of
play as previously, but the introduction must be recognised as more
artificial and forced, and this can be justified because so many
children are not normal with regard to speech, and only where this is
the case should language training be forced upon them. Habits of
courtesy, of behaviour at table, of position, of dressing and
undressing, of washing hands and brushing teeth, and many others, must
all be _taught_, but taught at the time when the need comes. Occasions
will certainly occur during play, but the chan